A glimpse at green

If you've ever considered making your home more green or dreamed of creating a home that is truly sustainable, but don't know where to start, the upcoming Green Built Home Tour offers exclusive access to certified green homes and the experts who created them.

The Green Built Home Tour is building on the success of last year's inaugural event and will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday July 26 and 27.

"We are really excited to host the tour again this year — it's a great chance to bring to life the difference sustainable products and building practices can make in anyone's home," says Katie Kaluzny, assistant director of U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) – Illinois. "USGBC Illinois is really striving to foster a dynamic green building community with a goal of making sure everyone works, lives and learns in a healthy green building in this generation."

For many what constitutes a green home or how to move toward that can be confusing.

Green is

"Green is a hard word to grasp, but we have homeowners and builders who will walk people through the process. It's a great education tool," Kaluzny says of the tour.

There are 15 homes on the tour so far and others are expected to be added. There are several in Chicago, a handful in the Northwest suburbs and five or six in the western suburbs. There is even a home in Springfield on the tour this year.

The homes are a wide spectrum, from a four-flat in Chicago to a smaller single family home in the suburbs. Some are newly built homes and others are rehabs and renovations of existing homes. What they all have in common, Kaluzny says, is they are all high-performance green homes that have earned third-party recognition or awards such as Energy Star, Passive House, LEED, GreenStar, and the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) National Green Building Standard.

Visitors can see the range of what can be done regardless of the homes size and ways to green an existing home, which is the most green thing homeowners can do, Kaluzny says. Renovation typically uses less material or reuses materials making it a green option.

Homes featured on the tour offer a glimpse at easy to do high performance insulations and low-VOC paints to more involved geothermal heating and cooling systems, solar roofs and drought tolerant no-mow lawns to reduce the need for fertilizers and chemicals.

Choice

Because the homes on the tour are spread out across a large region, attendees can pick and choose how many homes they want to tour.

There is an all-access pass for $25 to visit any and all of the homes during the two-day tour. A $10 pass is also available if you just want to visit a home near your neighborhood.

More information about the tour, homes featured and volunteer opportunities is available on the Green Built Home Tour website at greenbuilthometour.org.

Participants can walk through the homes and see the green features and building first hand. There are builders, engineers, architects and other experts at the homes to answer questions.

"The tour is a one-of-a-kind venue for consumers to experience green-building innovations and green technologies for the home. For design and building professionals, the tour is a unique opportunity to showcase your brand, your services, and your expertise in a way that sets you apart," Kaluzny says.

A first

Brandon Weiss, owner of Brandon Weiss Building & Development, participated last year showcasing the first certified passive home in Chicago. Passive homes have a stringent building code, are well-insulated, air tight and include systems that help the home use at least 80 percent less energy than conventional homes.

This year Weiss will feature three homes on the tour including a custom built passive home in River Forest with National Association of Home Builders Emerald certification; a home under construction at Serosun Farms, a completely sustainable community being developed in Hampshire; and a house under construction in downtown Geneva that will be a certified passive house and also certified non-toxic with special attention to indoor air quality.

Seeing the homes while they are under construction will give visitors on the tour a chance to see what really goes into making a home green and offer an opportunity to educate people, Weiss says.

"It's a good opportunity to get a look in a green, sustainable home and see what's really behind the walls that make it unique," he says.

The tour offers an opportunity for a behind-the-scenes look at functional green homes as well as a chance to ask questions and meet with experts.

Kaluzny says last year most of the tours went longer than anticipated because people had so many good questions for the experts.

Kaluzny says they saw consumers who were interested in living greener and architects, builders and designers who wanted to come and see what is being done in the area.